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Possible Duplicate:
How to check if an email address exists without sending an email?

I'm looking for a way to verify if a particular email address really exists, i.e. not just to make sure that name@domain.com is in the right format, but that bobsmith@gmail.com really exists and isn't made up.

Essentially, I'm looking for some way to implement the same functionality as a website like this: http://verify-email.org/

I'm assuming this would require sending some sort of null email to the mailbox and checking the received response, but I'm not sure how to go about sending a query email without sending a real email.

I haven't been able to find anything that does this - all search results are generally inundated with posts on how to validate that an email is entered in the right format with regex.

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

Community
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Intenex
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    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/565504/how-to-check-if-an-email-address-exists-without-sending-an-email?rq=1 – Timmy O'Mahony Oct 23 '12 at 20:16
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    You can't do this well. That website presumably uses SMTP VRFY but that is very unreliably implemented because it can useful to spammers. The universal way to verify if an email exists is to send an email to it and ask the user to respond/click on a link -- anything other than that is unreliable. – Andrew Gorcester Oct 23 '12 at 20:20
  • Does this help? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5374818/how-can-i-know-if-a-email-is-sent-correctly-with-django-python/ – Mathieu Dhondt Oct 23 '12 at 22:26

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Or if you don't want to take the url validation approach you could just send the email and poll for a reply. If the inbox does not exist you will get an automated reply from the email daemon of the domain where you sent the email.

Of course this will not guarantee you a reply from the mailer daemon.

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